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First painting session

The airbrush arrived along with airbrush cleaning fluid, an airbrush cleaning station and this airbrush paint station from HobbyZone (my whole desk is covered in their stuff, so I felt confident this thing would be great, and it is!)

With the airbrush all set up I decided to test out on a Gnarlmaw and base coat it. Success! Now on to the Great Unclean One.

Having base coasted with Vallejo Primer black, I then used GW's White Scare Air in an attempt to shade a little before putting the base coat on.

Which was a mistake.

As is my experience with all GW's whites and some of their bright yellows, it came out chalky and lumpy. I tried making sure the paint was stirred thoroughly, I added thinner, but nothing helped so I stopped there and waited to get some Vallejo white. The Vallejo white came out smooth as and worked great for this highlighting stage.

Finally I basecoated the whole thing in Vallejo Game Air Dead Flesh, as per Terry's excellent video. All these stages had to be repeated for each head and arm choice so it took a while! Happily it's a very smooth finish, so the "chalkiness" from the GW white that was on some of the model didn't come through this final layer. It was much less chunky that the GW white rattlecan spray, which I've had some pretty bad experiences with!

Stuff I leanred from this first session:
-Don't use GW whites ever again.
-Every paint behaves differently through an airbrush. I didn't think it would be the case, but Vallejo white requires different air pressure than Dead Flesh and seems to come out slower too. I think testing out every paint on some paper first is going to be required so I know exactly what I'm working with.
-The cheap pump is great but can get very hot. I'm not sure how it would do after a day's painting session. I've used it for about 2 hours straight at most.
-The cheap airbrush is fine, but maintenance can be a bit frustrating- it has a side gravity feed, not just a cup on top, which seems to introduce an additional corner for paint to get stuck in! From tutorials and videos, all airbrushes seem to need this maintenance, so it's not really an issue. As mentioned above, different paints behave quite differently- sometimes not much paint is coming through, or it sprays out in a wider area. I'm not sure if this is the brush or my maintenance which isn't thorough or consistent enough.